Abstract
The magnitude and nature of the COVID-19 pandemic prevents public health policies from relying on coercive enforcement. Practicing social distancing, wearing masks and staying at home becomes voluntary and conditional on the behavior of others. We present the results of a large-scale survey experiment in nine countries with representative samples of the population. We find that both empirical expectations (what others do) and normative expectations (what others approve of) play a significant role in compliance, beyond the effect of any other individual or group characteristic. In our vignette experiment, respondents evaluate the likelihood of compliance with social distancing and staying at home of someone similar to them in a hypothetical scenario. When empirical and normative expectations of individuals are high, respondents’ evaluation of the vignette’s character’s compliance likelihood goes up by 55% (relative to the low expectations condition). Similar results are obtained when looking at self-reported compliance among those with high expectations. Our results are moderated by individuals’ trust in government and trust in science. Holding expectations high, the effect of trusting science is substantial and significant in our vignette experiment (22% increase in compliance likelihood), and even larger in self-reported compliance (76% and 127% increase before and after the lockdown). By contrast, trusting the government only generates modest effects. At the aggregate level, the country-level trust in science, and not in government, becomes a strong predictor of compliance.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-COV-2 has led many countries to implement strict measures to limit the spread of the disease [1]
Given that compliance likelihood is collected using a Likert scale and self-reported compliance is elicited in a binary survey question, the tests used in each comparison are described in detail in every table
We assess the effect of the manipulations on compliance likelihood with normative and empirical expectations and trust in government and science as predictors, controlling for country fixed effects and individual characteristics in the supplementary materials, even when we refer to the robustness checks in the main text
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-COV-2 has led many countries to implement strict measures to limit the spread of the disease [1]. Advocated by both governments and scientists, these measures go from voluntary social distancing and mask wearing to mandatory stay-at-home policies [2, 3]. Given the scale of the pandemic, the effectiveness of these measures relies on people’s voluntary compliance, as governments cannot coercively enforce them. People’s belief about how others in their reference group are behaving, their empirical expectations, and their beliefs about what others believe is the right thing to do, their normative expectations, might influence their behavior [19, 20]
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